Woodland elf ... enchanted forest, Yaoi daydreams...

A woodland elf ... and I'm getting distinctly Yaoi vibes off this! The character would bear some more exploration, yes??! (nudge, wink)

Just daydreaming today ... still playing with the Ferendir skinmap, exploring ways to get the most out of it in DAZ Studio without -- yet -- seeing if Iray loves or hates it. You can't know till you try it and see what happens. This is "just" a raytrace, with the render settings cranked way up; and I also played with the tattoos packaged with Ferendir. The face and body morphs are my own design, though, using Morphs++. I'd forgotten how much I used to enjoy making new characters -- and this one is a beaut:

Sooo, because it take a fraction of the time to get a raytrace (rather than waiting all day for Iray), let's go again -- same character, new scenario, telling a story, or at least hinting at one:

Treasure -- a hunt for the stuff, by the looks of this! A ruin, a lantern, something sparkling with jewels. And take a look at that skinmap. This is marvelously responsive, and with a slight adjustment in the lighting it can look either very pale or deeper colored, almost Hispanic. Me like. I also really like this new face morph:

So, what you have here is Michael 4, custom face and body done in Morphs++, Ferendir skinmap, plus the facial tattoos, M4 Displacement to achieve the vascular mapping, Neftis's Danyel hair set to black, one of DM's columns used as a plinth, and the lantern from DM's Pyrago. In the top render, I used the Euros skirt with lots of surface mapping, plus two of Merlin's trees sized to be bushes, and the menhir from DM's Elven Rock. The backdrops are just that: backdrops. If I'd done this as sets (which I could have), they'd have been rendering for three times as long. Backdrops save a ton of time.

That's it for me, for today. Must sleep! Also, thunder is rumbling and it's probably wise to turn the computers off. Lots more to play with -- the only new toys I got around to today were the tattoos, the lamp and the backdrops! The toy box is overflowing with goodies! (Boom goes the thunder ... it really is time to log out and turn off...)

A swordsman in the snow ... whooo!

Hunting around through the "assets" I bought a long, long time ago -- and never had the harddrive space to install! -- I came upon this skinmap: Ferendir, by a designer called "SixthSense." It's a gorgeous skinmap, and renders beautifully ... though I do admit, I painted the eyebrows, which are too pale and thin for my liking; and I also applied the SAV Atlas displacement mapping on the torso and arms to bring up good venous mapping. But just take look at this skinmap in closeup -- if you can, see it at full size:

That's superb. A pleasure to watch it rendering! Using the Atlas displacement maps adds an extra dimension to it; and I designed a new face to go with this map. This is not the Ferendir face morph, as packaged by the designer. To be honest, the original face doesn't do anything for me. You might like it, and the good news is, it's still available from Renderosity.

So, not wanting a teenager, I designed a face and body I like, and came up with this:

This is what I love about working with Michael 4: it's so easy, and so quick, to get results. Sure, Genesis  can be significantly closer to full-on photo-realism, but it takes soooo long to get anywhere, especially on a slow system like mine. With M4 you can create new characters on the fly in a snap. I rather like this face -- and the eyes are the brilliant green item from The Eyes Have it set:

The hair is hand-painted, based on the old Mario's Hair for M4, from Neftis Hair Salon. That doesn't render up so well (well, it's quick, but the downside to that is, you pay for speed in low-rez results: human hair isn't supposed to go around corners, and so forth), but it does give you a good base to paint over, and ... Photoshop to the rescue again.

The snow is an old .ABR brush, Ron's Magical Snow, from the days when Ron's brushes could be used with Photoshop Elements. Alas, his new brushes need the full on Creative Suite version, or whatever it is these days ... I can't use them. I'm still running Elements 9! It works, I own it outright, and I've no reason to change it, since it does everything I want it to! The only thing is, sometimes people come along with fabulous new brushes which I can't use; but there's a free site, All Free Download (dot com), which is loaded with old fashioned brushes. They are absolutely free and this is not one of those sites plagued with viruses and such antisocial rubbish. It's perfectly safe, and the worst thing you might have to do is look at a couple of pay-per-view commercials in exchange for downloading some very good .abr brushes. Enjoy!

This sword is Merlin's Katana ... but I've been unpacking loads of props from years ago, and just discovered that I own Xurge 3D's Ranger weapons! I had no idea I had these -- expect to see them very soon. I honestly have no idea what I have stashed away from 2013 or so. Even though I didn't have the harddrive space, I shopped a lot of sales, grabbed fantastic special offers. Now's the time to bring them out, dust them off and play! The Ferendir skinmap is one such stashed item. It renders as well as anything I've ever seen, and with the pixel and shadow sampling settings cranked way up on 3Delight, the resolution is brilliant. That skin absolutely glows.

The costume is the bottom half of Xurge 3D's Medieval Royalty cossie; you saw the whole thing yesterday. Now I've got the surface texture adjustments worked out to get good results in Studio from an item configured for Poser, it's easy to work with...

And so to bed. More tomorrow! 

Moody lighting, fantasy sets ... Genesis 8 and Michael 4

Genesis 8 (the Dae character wearing Varun hair, in fact), standing in the old Reparation set -- which renders up well in Iray, by some complete fluke. Half the time, the old materials don't work in Iray; and half the time they do. Curiouser and curiouser. Anyway, this was Take One on an idea I've been pursuing for a couple of days --

Very nice render quality on that -- but the strength of the image is in the lighting and camera settings; and those I did in Studio 3 (!) before sending the whole thing over to Studio 4. In fact, I designed and built this set, lighting and camera around a scene using Xurge 3D's Medieval Royalty costume, on Michael 4 ...

Again, that's a heck of a nice render -- it's "just" a Studio 3 raytrace, because ... well, the guys at Xurge are not joking when they warn you, their costumes are optimized for Poser and may not work in DAZ Studio. Some do, some don't; and this one really doesn't. It took about an hour of working around and around it, to come up with a compromise, where the costume might not look as if would in Poser, but at least it looks terrific.

Borrowing a catalog image from Xurge, this is what it ought to look like:

Catalog image. See this.

Well, after an hour of work, I was about halfway there and decided to cut my losses and call it good! It's fairly reasonable:

...in another hour I might have got it, but I'd had enough of fiddling about, for a couple of reasons. The best I was going to get was a Studio 3 render on this, because in Studio 4 it would have to be reconfigured all over again ... and I can't save a file out of Studio 4, so any work I put into renders on that platform is ephemeral: one shot. Soooo -- I decided to call it right here and be satisfied...

Well, okay, not quite. Just for fun (ha!) I let Iray have a go at rendering this same costume, and the results are idiotic. Laughable. I actually spent another half hour trying to get Iray to "shake hands" with this costume, and it utterly refused, so -- stuff it.

The set rendered beautifully, though, so I left the set, camera and lights just as they were, deleted the Michael 4 and put in a Genesis 8 in his place ... which is where you came in, today!

The last image for this post is left over from yesterday. I didn't get to an upload because I had the headache from hell, but I did finish out the work with Xurge's Druid Shaman costume...

Now, that's a Studio 4 raytrace, with progressive rendering turned on and all the settings cranked up till it took about half an hour to render. Oh, yeah ...

I actually find myself wondering if Iray can make sense of this costume??? No way to tell, without trying it! I'll come back to this in a few days. I have a couple of things to render while they're burning in my imagination, so we'll set this one aside for a little while and come back to it.

Also, I treated myself to some new toys from Renderosity right before I came up with the aforementioned headache from hell. I'd love to get them installed tomorrow. So -- more soon!

Xurge fantasy goodies, and chasing image quality ... whoooo!

Nope, that's not an Iray render, and that ain't Genesis. That's good old Michael 4, and a Studio 4.11 raytrace right out of 3Delight, with the render settings cranked way high. Now I'm amazed. Also thrilled to bits. Take a closer look, see how the mapping renders up:

Firstly, that's believable sunlight, and the higher sampling rate brings the skin tones up brilliantly. I've dialed the render settings up so high on this, the render took a whole whopping 43 minutes, as against nine or ten for the default settings. Whooo! So, let's go again --

Wow. Seriously. The costume is Xurge 3D's Druid Shaman, which is optimized for Poser ... I only needed to overdrive the displacement mapping and dial down the specularity for it to render up beautifully in Studio. The skinmap is SAV Atlas (from Renderosity), but the vascular map is the M4 Displacement from the DAZ marketplace. The eyes are the dark brown option from The Eyes Have It (DAZ marketplace). The set is DM's Elven Shed again (Renderosity), and the trees you see here are the Deluxe Trees, also from DAZ marketplace, I think. Depth of field is turned on, and the virtual aperture is set to F/15 to get this effect. I have two lights on it, with softer shadows.

I did a tiny bit of painting in Photoshop afterward, largely because the mask needed a little help to look good in a screaming closeup. Seen very close, it's obviously made in halves and "stuck together:" the diffuse map doesn't quite match down the nose. But it's a dead easy fix in post, if you just give it a few minutes. And the costume has an impeccable fit on Michael 4. Take a close look at the sandals.

So, since raytraces are done in a lot less than an hour, let's go again with two Michael 4 characters in Xurge 3D costumes, and a set --

This time I wanted two very different skinmaps, hair, faces. Aside from a couple of "artifacts" in the render, and adding highlights to the hair, I did nothing at all to this. Oh -- I hand-painted the body hair on the paler character. Otherwise, you have two M4s, Xurge's Untamed, their Druid Shaman sans the headdress and mask, DM's Mirador set, the Aether hair on the swarthy character, the My Rock Star Hair from Neftis on the paler character. Faces and body morphs designed by me, and again, the vascular mapping is the M4 Displacement map set. (You have to be careful with that one. It has four settings, low, medium, high and super, but anything over medium crumples the mesh on the base figure, so really, only low and medium are useful.)

I switched out materials in a couple of places, changed some diffuse colors, to make the costumes "pop" a little more in Studio -- Xurge warns that they're configured for Poser, and some of the textures do render up rather flat on the default settings. Easy to  fix...

This was just a twenty minute render, even at high-quality settings on 3Delight ... no trees, LOL. Like hair, trees really slow a render down. Even so, a forty minute render is screamingly fast by comparison with anything I can get out of my old PC in Iray, so I'm happy.

Been looking at systems and components. Went to the IT Warehouse site and picked out all the components I'd like built into my new system ... added by the retail value and had to laugh. I just built a (hypothetical!) $3,030 system. We're going to have to come down to earth here, when I finally go shopping, this time next year. We'll see. For the moment, I have tons of toys to play with -- scores of things I haven't even installed yet. So -- more soon! 😁